We believe the Gothic isn’t just a genre; it’s a worldview. A way of noticing what’s beating under the floorboards of ourselves and each other. Cradle & Crypt offers essays, creative fragments, and occasional dispatches from the void.

Cradle & Crypt is the creative identity of Leslie Patton — writer, archivist of the uncanny, and mother of monsters. Equal parts dispatch, diary, and creative sanctum, it’s a haven for those who write in the margins of their own lives. For mothers and monsters. For shift-workers and shadow-dwellers. For anyone fascinated by the abject, the sacred, and the strange after the baby’s asleep or the boss stops watching.

A note: We use “motherhood” as a lens, not a limit. This space is for anyone who has created in the dark, tended something fragile, been made monstrous by their devotion. Gender expansive, queer, childfree, grieving, longing, haunted, beyond — we mother in many forms.